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— 





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By J. B. S. Haldane 
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THE CONQUEST OF CANCER 
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S. 
One merit of Mr. Wright’s plan is that he tells people what in his judgment, 
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and she maintains that intellectual activities and domesticity are not in- 
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By A. M. Ludovici 
Full of brilliant common sense.—London Observer. 
WHAT I BELIEVE. By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 
The cogent thinking and brilliant writing make this a book to be considered 
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A consideration of the problems of heredity and environment. 


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An account of “cross-country” vehicles which will achieve a revolution as 
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By Colonel J. F. C. Fuller 
A ny and penetrating analysis of the American spirit. A companion volume 
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HEPHAESTUS, or The Soul of the Machine 

By E. E. Fournier d’Albe 
A study of the relations between man and his machines. It is vigorous and 
original in point of view. 
TIMOTHEUS, or The Future of the Theatre 

By Bonamy Dobrée 
A forecast of the possibilities of the theatre in the future. 
THRASYMACHUS, or The Future of Morals 

By E. M. C. Joad 
A stimulating book by a well known author who thinks along practical, 
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By Dr. R. McNair Wilson 
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TIMOTHEUS 


OR 


The Future of the 
Theatre 


BONAMY DOBREE 


Author of “Restoration Comedy 1660-1720,” 
“Histriophone,” “Essays in Biography” 





“Even the powerful mind of Dr. Johnson seemed 
foiled by futurity.”—Boswell. 


New York 
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PREFATORY NOTICE 


This booklet is Chapter Twenty- 
three of a work already largely in 
being, but of which very little will be 
published in the reader’s lifetime; for 
though the author has none of that 
false respect for the wishes of the dead 
and the privacies of contemporaries 
which still causes so much avoidable 
inconvenience in social life, that feel- 
ing of delicacy towards posterity, now 
so active an influence as sometimes to 
shrink from exposing its members even 
to existence, hinders his speaking fully. 

Being obnoxious to the sufferings of 
others, he had, in 1915, the good 
fortune to acquire Mr H. C. Wells’ 


Time Machine. Choosing a remote 
Vii 


TIMOTHEUS 


corner of our island, and building due 
safeguards against possible bumps in 
time—I will not forestall the account 
given in Chapter Two of his work—he 
arrived at the year 2,100 (O.S.*) with 
no further damage than a slight bruise 
on his knee caused by the shovel of an 
archaeologist in search of human re- 
mains thought to be of the same period 
as the Cro-Magnon man. 

The details of how the author was 
greeted, conducted, honoured, and 
spied upon are not here to be told— 
much is left to the reader to infer; 
verb, sap.,as we say. But there are two 
points the latter must bear in mind: 
the first that there are things the au- 
thor has bound himself not to divulge, 
and which will never be known until 


* Our Style. 
Vili 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


they occur; the second, that he has had 
to rely on his memory alone. A little 
thought will make the reason plain: 
although he took copious notes, and 
these are in existence, they are so only 
in future time, and will not become 
available until the year 2,100. This 
last statement, I fear, bristles with 
issues, and opens up deep scientific and 
philosophical questions, involving 
on the one hand relativity and on the 
other vitalism, which I have neither 
the space nor the ability to dispose of. 
But very vivid in the author’s mind is 
the remembrance of his emotion on 
first seeing the writing fade backwards 
out of his notebooks, and becoming 
bitterly aware that time was a rever- 
sible flux. He returned to 1920, a study 


of history having informed him, as far 
ix 


TIMOTHEUS 


as he could unravel the evidence, that 
his feelings would be less lacerated in 
that year than seemed likely in 1915. 
He then settled down to write his great 
work, which he will give to the world 
piecemeal as discretion permits: (the 
reader has only to glance at our law 
reports to see that were futurity dis- 
played, the enjoyment of life and that 
nice adjustment of personal desires to 
social duties which our time has per- 
fected, could not exist), and I have 
persuaded him to allow me to make 
known this chapter on the theatre, 
which can break no bones, or even 
abrade the most delicate skin. 

I have, indeed, taken the liberty of 
making some omissions in order to 
brevity, and, I freely admit, for 
decency’s sake; for I do not hold with 


x 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


the modern fashion of protesting that 
nothing is withheld, and forthwith 
teasing the reader with a series of 
dots or stars. 

Why the book is called ‘Timotheus’ 
will be evident to those who bear in 
mind the name of the ‘Mighty 
Master,’ the Wagner of Alexander 
the Great’s day, who 


“Cou’d swell the Soul to Rage, or 
kindle soft Desire.” 


xi 





II. 
TET. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Pere OR NO PIC esis pecewasrad Vii 
THE NATIONAL THEATRE............ 1 
THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY.......... 21 
Ra Ae DELICATE RES ssresscsocetcssossiocoatuccs 45 





TIMOTHEUS 





I 
THE NATIONAL THEATRE 


Our air-taxi landed us at what I 
took to be the nineteenth floor, and we 
walked almost at once into a huge hy- 
perboloid pit, the walls of which con- 
sisted of tiers of seats. It would hold, 
I gathered, some twenty thousand 
people, and much resembled a Roman 
theatre, except for the peculiar curve 
of the walls, and the seats continuing 
to the very bottom of the funnel. 
There was no sign of any stage, and on 
my questioning Fabian,’ he pointed to 
the saucer-like dome which formed the 
roof, or lid of the building. I was afraid 


?The author’s general guide—Vergil to his Dante. 


[i] 


TIMOTHEUS 


that to keep my eyes fixed upon this 
airy stage would mean ricking my neck, 
but I was reassured on being shown the 
shape of our seats. Not only were they 
well slanted back, but they were also 
provided with rests for the head, such 
as we are familiar with at our barbers’ 
and dentists’; and I was told that with 
the body in the position proper to the 
chairs, our emotional apparatus lent 
itself most readily to suggestion. 

I then asked him if the performance 
was to be a good one, and he replied 
that “The clutch was officially ranked 
as A2 for efficiency, but that he did not 
know what it was for.” I was much 
puzzled as to his meaning until I 
learnt that ‘clutch’ was the name given 
to a drama of the kind about to take 
place, where everything was under the 


[2] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


control of one man, the ‘fairfusser’ as 
he is called, who designs the move- 
ment, the emotional sequences, the 
voices, and whatever else is needed. I 
laid myself open to much banter on the 
part of Ierne* by asking whether it was 
to be a tragedy or a comedy: such a 
crude distinction, she said, was typical 
of the muddle-headedness of our age, 
on a level with the antitheses classical- 
romantic, conservative-liberal, matter- 
mind, and even intellect-emotion we 
were so fond of making, and which for 
absurdity were only equalled by our 
craze for dressing men and women in 
different sorts of clothes. The object 
of a drama, Fabian enlightened me, 
was to summon up a given state of 


*The author’s guide in the more intimate 
social relationships. 
[3] 


TIMOTHEUS 


being, pure or complex; and once the 
fairfusser knew what the clutch was 
for, it was his business to produce the 
right emotion. I began to speak of 
emotion for its own sake, but Ierne 
hurriedly checked me, saying that I 
would shock anyone who might over- 
hear, for there was no biological value 
in emotion for its own sake. This 
made me think less agreeably of her 
kindness to me on the last evening. 

I was therefore still confused by 
their speaking of what a clutch was 
‘for, as though it might be a sort of 
charity matinée, and was about to put 
the question, when the theatre became 
pitch dark: the clutch was beginning. 

At first I was aware only that the 
roof, or ‘stage’? had become luminous, 
the light varying in strength, as it does 

[4] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


on the ceiling of a room when clouds 
travel across the sun. Soon it became 
more steadily bright, and vague hu- 
man figures began to take shape on it, 
shadows at first, some of enormous 
size, advancing and retreating, making 
wide gestures of an import I could not 
grasp. Sometimes the shadows would 
assume solid shape and stand up as live 
beings, seeming to detach themselves 
from the dome so as not to appear in 
the least like those extravagant persons 
who populate the ceilings of many of 
our own theatres: and among them was 
one singularly graceful form which 
seemed to dominate the rest, and whose 
motions I could not help following, so 
great was the pleasure they gave me. 

Soon I became conscious that the 
air of the theatre was pulsating in a 


ord 


TIMOTHEUS 


manner which never quite became 
sound, and in a definite rhythm, which 
varied occasionally, but yet seemed to 
conform to the original beat, much as 
a poet will modulate his verse. Nowa 
faint perfume hit the sense, while an 
uneasy feeling stole over me, as if 
something had been done I did not 
want. Then, from the body of the 
theatre, as from a member of the 
audience, a voice spoke, in the tones 
of a man resigned to grief. 
No means at all to hide 


Man from himself can find: 
No way to start aside. 


Out of the hell of mind. 
and I felt myself sinking into such an 
agony of despair as I can remember 
having gone through only in dreams, 
or under the influence of supernatural 


[6] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


fear. Struggle as I might against the 
weight of oppression, I was forced to 
abandon myself to the flow of dire 
tribulation,in which remorse succeeded 
terror, and all the passions of the 
world were black. And fromall around 
the theatre, now from here, now from 
there, above me and below me, some- 
times in front and sometimes at my 
back, I could hear voices and the noise 
of approaching events. Once I thought 
a voice cried out: 


Desolate, as she is desolate, in 
ruined cities, and when the sun has 
gone down to his rest. 


and in the midst of a tumult of pulsa- 
tions and perfumes and shadowy 
occurrences, 2 woman whispered, it 
seemed close by my ear: 


[7] 


TIMOTHEUS 
And Pity, like a naked, new-born babe. 


At that the sense of intolerable woe 
lightened; the rhythm changed, the 
figures appeared human and brave, 
while joy seemed to issue from the very 
walls of the theatre with the words: 


Love’s banners on the battlements 
of song, 


which trickled from every side. At 
last, without warning, in a triumphant 
burst of sudden glory such as makes 
us laugh with active lungs, a loud but 
harmonious cry resounded from the 
very middle of the theatre, where 
there was nothing visible but empty 
air, calling: 


Where are the eagles and the 
trumpets? 


[8] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


and I remembered no more till we 
found ourselves perched on the outer 
landing of the theatre waiting for our 
taxi to take us home. 

It was then that I found myself prey 
to strange and mingled, but insistent 
emotions, partly of kindly generosity, 
and partly of self-sacrifice. Looking 
at the men and women around me I 
could see that they too were strongly 
moved, making gestures foreign to the 
occasion, such as taking out their 
pocket-books, searching in them fever- 
ishly, and doing sums on slips of paper. 
Some whom I could see were giving 
themselves up to despair, and others 
were arguing with their wives. Fabian 
then pointed out to me that most of 
the carriages taking people away from 
the theatre, instead of flying in all 

[9] | 


TIMOTHEUS 


directions, made for a building upon 
which was written large 
SUBSCRIBE HERE FOR THE EURBANK 
LOAN. OFFICES OPEN. 
That, he said, accounted for the 
clutch. There wasa crisis, he continued, 
in the bank upon which the credit of 
the League of Europe was founded, 
and the governments were anxious to 
sell the scrip of the new loan. The 
clutch we had seen had, no doubt, been 
performed that afternoon in the larger 
towns all over the continent, the lan- 
guage alone being suitably varied; 
and by this means the bank would be 
placed on a firm footing once more. 
My emotion was damped on learning 
this, for after all, I could have little 
interest in the finances of a country in 
which I had no stake: but enough of 
[ 10 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


my feeling was left to make me give a 
foolishly large tip to the driver of our 
machine. 

I was naturally curious to know by 
what means the frame of mind had 
been aroused, and in the evening 
Fabian was kind enough to enlighten 
me, going very learnedly into the 
origins of the form which met with 
such success. I was very surprised, 
and not a little proud, to find that a 
large part of the science had had its 
starting point in our own day, as he 
showed from several old books: but he 
on his part seemed inclined to think we 
had been wanting in genius to have had 
so much knowledge to hand, and yet 
not have been able to use it. 

The shape of the theatre had been 
chosen for acoustic reasons, on account 


[11] 


TIMOTHEUS 


of certain properties of the hyperbola, 
which I had not the mathematics to 
understand, but which, Fabian said, had 
been utilised in the third (1914-1918) 
of the five great wars of European 
settlement, for finding out by their 
report, the exact post of hidden guns. 
It was this which had enabled the fair- 
fusser to make the last cry seem to 
come from the void; the other speeches 
had merely been delivered by variously 
placed loud-speakers, connected in due 
turn with a wireless gramophone. I 
may here say that the phrases I have 
remembered and written down are only 
a very small number of those used in 
the performance, and which, for some 
reason, seemed familiar. The other 
words spoken in the clutch were of 
like great emotive power, chosen or in- 


[12] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


vented by the fairfusser for this reason 
alone: and though they may seem to 
have no logical thread, or connection 
in real life, their place in the scheme 
was very carefully thought out. The 
reasons, and the terminology, for all 
this were too far advanced for me to 
be able to hold them in my head, but 
I have since traced some passages 
Fabian showed me as early sources of 
the form, and which will give the 
reader some idea of the great clever- 
ness of the design. 


“Thus the indirect methods of 
hypnotising, like many of the techni- 
cal procedures used in making jokes, 
have the effect of checking certain dis- 
tributions of mental energy which 
would interfere with the course of 
events in the unconscious, and they 


[ 13] 


TIMOTHEUS 


lead eventually to the same result as 
the direct methods of influence by 
means of staring or stroking.” * 

From there the high road is plain to 
see; the phrases of the clutch check or 
loosen ‘certain distributions of mental 
energy,’ for art is only a kind of 
hypnotism: but the perfection which 
I had ‘felt? had not been arrived at 
without much arduous trial. At one 
time jumbled up words had been tried, 
or single ones, but even the most strik- 
ing, such as death, or beauty, or ruin, 
had not had an effect at all to be put 
beside that of the shortest sentence. 
Familiar quotations had also been 
made use of, but they were put by for 
two reasons. The first was that all 
men did not respond in the same way, 


*Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis 
of the Ego, page 97. 


[14] 


FUTURE OF ‘THE THEATRE 


since all men are not equally noble, 
some even finding risible “Tears, idle 
tears, | know not what they mean.” 
The second was that hardly any quota- 
tions were familiar enough to be known 
by everybody: for example, the words 
“Till the conversion of the Jews” 
moved people quite unevenly, some 
connecting them with religion, others 
with their pass-books, and a few with 
an old obscure poem. This, besides 
preventing many from entering into 
the proper mood, destroyed that single- 
ness in the audience without which the 
highest suggestible state cannot be 
reached: for an emotion is infectious 
only if the units of the crowd are 
ready to agree together, as I have often 
noticed on first nights when the friends 
of an author try to sweep the critics 


Lit Sig 


TIMOTHEUS 


away on a tide of noisy enthusiasm. 
And further, emotion caught on the 
wing is always stronger than when it is 
the result of deliberate thought. 

As to the shadows on the ‘stage,’ 
these were for fixing the attention of 
all upon the same thing; and I dis- 
covered that every member of the 
audience had been greatly drawn to- 
wards the figure which had seized 
upon my imagination, and had to some 
extent made himself one with it, as we 
now do sometimes with the hero of a 
play. This had served to transform 
the loose ‘herd’ into a unified and thus 
suggestible ‘horde,’ if I do not mistake 
the terms. 

The air being made to throb was 
merely to create a rhythm, the effects 
of which had been keenly studied. 

[ 16 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


Again to copy a passage I have traced: 

“Among the results-of rhythm sus- 
ceptibility and vivacity of emotion, 
limitations of the field of attention, 
marked differences in the incidence of 
belief feelings closely analagous to 
those which alcohol and nitrous oxide 
can induce . . . may be noted.”* 
and I can willingly believe this, for I 
have myself often felt very curiously 
stirred when listening to the jazz-band 
at young people’s parties. 

The naming of nitrous oxide, or 
laughing gas as it used to be called, 
brings me to the perfumes, which, I 
learnt, were led along each row of seats 
by what I had taken for hot-water 
pipes. This again, Fabian said, was a 
legacy of the third (1914-1918) Great 


1]. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary 
Criticism page 143. 


[17] 


TIMOTHEUS 


War of European Settlement, and he 
gave me to read an account I have 
since recovered of a gas which caused 
“the most appalling mental distress 
and misery.”* Of course the means 
had been much refined, and the fair- 
fusser could at will set free gases 
which brought about sorrow, fear, joy, 
shame, the love of glory or of animals, 
and indeed any emotion, all without 
the least risk of harm; though it is 
true that some serious mishaps, 
especially in the early stages, had un- 
luckily happened. 

The combined result was that almost 
any feeling, and any required degree 
of that feeling, could be produced by 
the fairfusser, and this the government 
found of the greatest use at times of 

1J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus. 


[18] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


political or European crisis, when wars 
were to be declared or averted, or any 
controversial measure passed. 

I was bound to utter my high ad- 
miration of the lengths to which the 
art of the drama had been carried, and 
made so salutary an influence, though 
I could not help doubting whether 
such a tool in the hands of rulers 
might not be a little dangerous: but I 
was assured that this had already been 
foreseen, and that the national the- 
atres were closed during the period of a 
general election, and of debates of high 
moment, such as those on the budget. 

I asked if there were no theatres in 
which human beings came upon the 
stage and strutted and talked after the 
manner of common life, as they do to- 
day, and I was told that there were 

[19] 


TIMOTHEUS 


many kinds: but that before going to 
see them I would be taken to the 
Dramatic Academy, which had been 
handsomely endowed by an Anglo- 
Caucasian millionaire. I thought I 
should learn more of the trend of the 
art by going there than by attendance 
at a number of theatres, and gladly 
consented to the proposal. 


[20] 


II 
THE DRAMATIC ACADEMY 


This academy is not an entire single 
building, but a continuation of several 
houses on both sides of a street, which 
growing waste (owing to changes in 
fashion ), was purchased and applied to 
that use. I was received very kindly 
by the warden, and went for many 
days to the academy. 

This was composed in three parts; 
one for research professors, another 
for play-makers, or fairfussers, and 
the third for students; the first being 
trained psychologists, the last, young 
men and women remarkable for 
beauty, fine feeling and intelligence, as 


[21 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


they are in our own day. The notion 
was for the professors to find out facts, 
for the fairfussers to apply them, and 
for the students to carry them out: and 
if it may occur to the reader that the 
workers in one side paid small heed to 
the discoveries of the rest, a little 
consideration will show that this is all 
to the good; for slavishly to accept 
the opinions of others can never lead 
to clarity of thought, and the warden 
was anxious to maintain in every in- 
mate that active spirit of self-reliance 
without which no advance can be made 
in any of the sciences. I saw many of 
each division, but to write of them all 
would be to take up inordinate space 
in these memorials, since the arts are 
not of large importance to the state or 
to the public. I shall, therefore, confine 


[ 22 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


myself to describing one or two of 
each kind, choosing those which throw 
most light on the methods of those 
days, and the great progress we can 
shortly expect. 

My first visit was to a, small, active 
professor, with a tiny clean-shaven 
chin, and unusually bright weasel eyes, 
who, speaking very fast, and with 
vivid gesture, easily convinced me of 
the usefulness of his discoveries. He 
had applied his mind for fifteen years 
to proving that there was no such thing 
as thought, for, he said, the conversa- 
tion he had to listen to, or the acts he 
was able to observe, could be accounted 
for without supposing such a thing 
existed. Speech, he explained, was 
merely a habit, like that of scratching 
when something causes our skin to 


E239} 


TIMOTHEUS 


itch; and, moreover, all our deeds 
were like scratching, which we do 
thoughtlessly, however much we may 
flatter ourselves that we prepare great 
things far ahead. He did not go to the 
Jengths of some of his colleagues, who 
denied the existence of consciousness: 
for, so as not to be too positive, he 
preferred to regard ‘awareness of the 
emotions’ as a fiction convenient to his 
purpose, or, to put it differently, as 
words merely to describe a sequence 
of events. By his system, when im- 
pulses are set up, something occurs, 
such as eating, and we are ‘satisfied,’ 
as We say: or we are ‘disappointed,’ 
as when prevented from a kindly 
action. 

I paid close heed to this part of his 
discourse, because he begged me not 


[ 24] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


to confuse his theory with that of a 
rival professor, who believed that 
allusive gestures gave rise to a corres- 
ponding emotion. This, he pointed out, 
was merely the out-of-date heresy that 
“A dog does not wag his tail because 
he is happy; but that he is happy 
because his tail wags.” This rival 
believed that if he made the gestures 
which usually go with certain emotions, 
he would undergo these feelings; and 
the spectator would, by ‘in-feeling’ or 
‘empathy’ (such were his barbarous 
terms) put their muscles in readiness 
to go through these movements, and 
so, in their turn, experience these 
emotions. For his part, when he had 
been to see this professor acting woe, 
far from feeling unhappy, he had 
barely been able to master his mirth. 


Lead 


TIMOTHEUS 


But, so as to give the theory a fair trial, 
he had wished with one of his pupils to 
observe the result of moving the tail 
of a dog quickly from side to side, but 
that unluckily, the pupil had been 
bitten before the experiment had 
reached a stage from which anything 
could be learnt. 

His own idea, he informed me, was 
to set up a known order of stresses and 
strains in the watchers’ nerves, and 
this could be done by cunning move- 
ments performed in front of them. I 
was not, however, to tax him with in- 
consistency, for his motto was ‘Not 
miming but movement,’ and though 
an actor had to use gestures, they must 
by no means be after the naif manner 
of his rival. He himself had spent 
over four years in the abstract study of 


[ 26 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


the movements proper to the passion 
of benevolence—abstract, because 
nothing is more misleading than what 
people relate of their own feelings: 
cruelty, for instance, they often de- 
scribe as a wish to better their neigh- 
bours. Indeed, another of his mottoes, 
he declared chuckling, was ‘No motion, 
no emotion’; and I could not but agree 
with him when I considered that after 
all, to lie in one’s bed all day and 
simply ‘think,’ as we stupidly call it, 
is no life at all. 

Yet I could not help trying toargue, 
feebly enough, that the showing of 
dreadful acts would call forth feelings 
of horror, as we may judge from the 
murder of Desdemona, and that fitting 
words would arouse pity in us, as they 
do in the same play. But, smiling at 


[27] 


TIMOTHEUS 


the clumsiness of my example, he re- 
marked that just there lay the error; 
for if we were truly to see a Moor, 
however splendid, plunging a knife 
into the body of a beautiful lady, our 
emotions, if we knew her to be guilt- 
less, would be very different from 
those we feel in a theatre; and that, 
instead of sitting still, we should most 
certainly interpose, or run to fetch the 
police. Again, while we were children, 
before our minds are distorted by what 
we erroneously call thought (but 
which is only an idle luxury-habit), 
Mr Punch beating his wife causes us 
tolaugh very loudly. This instance, he 
said, would also prove how much more 
useful movements were than words, 
since for ten who would laugh at a 
Punchand Judyshow, hardly one would 
[ 28 ] 


Pi bURLY OR eT Hie iH bATRE 


smile at the wittiest thingsin Pascal. It 
was only on reflection that I could al- 
together make his views my own, for it 
is not easy for us to give up opinions we 
have held ever since we can remember. 

To test the movements appropriate 
to various emotions, this professor had 
invented a machine, which, by reason 
of the changes in electrical resistance 
a body undergoes under the action of 
the passions, recorded the feelings of 
any person subjected to it. This 
machine he had just brought to per- 
fection, and to give me a demonstra- 
tion, he sat me in a chair made of some 
amalgam unknown to me, and fitted 
with sockets into which my head, hands 
and feet were clamped. A piece of 
wireless apparatus, supplied with a 
diaphragm such as make a part of our 


[ 29 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


telephone receivers, was placed over 
my heart, and, my loins being bared, 
my lumbar vertebrae were played upon 
by a peculiar ray. Above my head, 
where I could not see it, was placed a 
marker, much like our telegraph 
morse-code dials, but corrugated and 
rayed after the manner of a fan. The 
professor could watch this while evolv- 
ing before me the strange movements I 
could connect with nothing I had ever 
seen, and so could vary his gestures ac- 
cording to the results shown. After 
about a quarter of an hour of erudite 
passes, the professor, wiping the sweat 
from his brow, triumphantly an- 
nounced the successful issue of his ex- 
periment, and asked me what emotion 
I felt. At that moment, having over- 
come my awe, I was filled with a pro- 


[30] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


found sense of pity, and on my con- 
fessing this, the professor danced with 
glee. Crying “Typical! Typical!” he 
pointed at the dial; but as the needle 
showed ‘Lust tempered with Senti- 
mentality’ I could not but feel that his 
wonderful invention needed alteration 
in a few details to perfect it. Neverthe- 
less, while doing up my braces, I framed 
a few remarks to make known my 
pleasure at seeing the drama make such 
strides in his hands; and promising to 
meet at a later day we parted with 
many expressions of esteem. I must 
also add this tribute to his ability: when 
I did visit him again, very fast, on my 
backward journey through time, even 
when all the motions were reversed, 
I once more felt very deeply the 
compassion his gestures had provoked. 


[31] 


TIMOTHEUS 


I next went to see a fairfusser, 
though not one in the service of the 
government, and was much impressed 
by his freedom from doubt as to the 
way in which the best result was to be 
reached. He said, with justice, that the 
artist’s desire was to communicate with 
his fellow creatures, and that the ob- 
ject of an actor was to place his soul in 
touch with that of others. Man, being 
in each case a unique individual, was 
fitted for work more noble than that 
of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe 
from an author to an audience, and the 
contrary view had been the grand 
error of all producers from the time 
of Shakespeare almost to his own day. 
The aim of an actor was to express 
himself (as a part of universal na- 
ture) and reveal a cup overbrimming 


[ 32 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


with passions. Any ideas introduced 
by an author were to be deprecated, for 
his business was strictly to provide the 
raw material; and so the teacher’s main 
efforts were to be directed towards 
training his pupils to rid the author’s 
words of any meaning they might con- 
tain, simply by the manner of speaking 
them. In this way nothing was al- 
lowed to come between the actor and 
the audience. This he claimed to be 
the especial discovery of his age, and 
one which he could not help regarding 
with more than a little pride. 

I made bold to tell him that his 
notion was not so new as he imagined, 
and that we too had actors who dis- 
believed that words had any plausible 
meaning apart from the emotion the 
actor could register through them: 

[ 33 J 


TIMOTHEUS 


men (as a rule well set up, or even 
bulky, since these are always the most 
passionate) who by a clever alteration 
in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a 
sentence in the middle, could effec- 
tively cancel any extraneous idea the 
words of an author might interpose 
between the feelings of the player and 
the minds of the audience. This con- 
structor was good enough to say that 
he was quite sure our age had not been 
so dark as was commonly supposed, but 
that, at least in our classical plays, 
which had been in verse, a form which 
compels a certain manner of speech, he 
thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met 
with difficulties hardly to be overcome. 
I was able to assure him that this was 
not so, and that, indeed, it was just in 
these very plays many of our actors 
[ 34] 


FUTURE OF. THE THEATRE 


had shown their highest genius; that: 
one might know Hamlet, for example, 
quite well by the book, and yet go to: 
two or three versions of the play and. 
hardly recognise any of the speeches, 
so much were they heightened and. 
made subtle in the speaking of them. 

I was also much taken by an in- 
vestigator who had made a highly 
diverting play simply with scenery, 
and a few mutes who now and again 
varied their place. It was his view that: 
we had always been astray in making 
people the centre of our dramas: it 
was their surroundings that mattered. 
—for who, he said, given the choice of 
seeing Brown eat his dinner, or a 
thunderstorm on Mount Everest, 
would not prefer to look at Mount: 
Everest? A modern producer could not: 

[35 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


help laughing at the remark of Aris- 
totle, if he ever read it, that ‘the spec- 
tacle was the least artistic part of a 
drama.’ A comely staircase, he averred, 
or even a rickety ladder, if it was tall 
enough, had more significance than a 
tale of hopeless love; and he was about 
to design a series of scenes in a logical 
order of forms and colours, green fol- 
lowing pink, which would make a 
spectator sadder than even a play by 
Sophocles. This I could well believe: 
but I found it hard to understand how 
it was right to allude to pink as though 
it were a premiss, for after all, nobody 
dreams of calling a rainbow a syllog- 
ism, any more than they do of saying 
‘paradox’ when they mean a hill. 

On another day I was taken to see a 
fairfusser at work on an old-fashioned 

[ 36 | 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


play which was to be ‘acted,’ in our 
sense of the word, by students. He 
made his actors rehearse a scene; and 
then all sat down on chairs and took 
up stereoscopic glasses. Immediately, 
at the other end of the room, two col- 
oured films appeared, exactly repro- 
ducing the movements of the actors, 
while at the same time a gramophone 
repeated the words they had uttered, 
in such a manner as to seem to come 
from the mouth of each actor who 
spoke. With the glasses the illusion 
was complete, and I could hardly be- 
lieve I was not re-dreaming the scene 
I had just witnessed, except that the 
producer could stop the play at will, or 
even go back to a phrase or gesture to 
point out the errors of voice or move- 
ment of which the actors had been 
[37] 


TIMOTHEUS 


‘guilty. He could also show how a 
‘gesture would be more effective if per- 
formed at a greater or less speed; and 
how admirable this method was I 
could judge from the looks of pleas- 
ure or mortification on the actors’ faces 
as they saw themselves displayed. 
There was one handsome young 
actor who seemed by his vehemence 
and assurance to be more talented than 
the rest, and to him I asked to be in- 
troduced, that I might learn his views 
from him. He led me aside, and with 
‘great earnestness explained to me how 
experience had shown that one could 
not take for granted the least intelli- 
gence in an audience. Words, he said, 
conveyed nothing to them unless ac- 
companied with appropriate action: 
and this he ascribed to the fact that an 
[ 38 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


audience was a crowd, and therefore 
followed the normal law of mass 
psychology in being much stupider and 
more primitive than a single person. 
The actor, therefore, had to deal with 
the simplest objects or ideas, indicat- 
ing them by a kind of airy drawing. 
The connection between them, the 
grammar or the syntax as it were (so 
he was kind enough to phrase it for 
my understanding) was portrayed by 
the actors’ emotion as expressed in 
gesture or tone. That was why plays 
with few words were better than plays 
with many words, as in the latter case 
the number of gestures became very 
tiring both to the eyes of the audience 
and the muscles of the actors. He 
had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for 
any player who stood still and with 
[39] 


TIMOTHEUS 


hardly a movement allowed sentences 
merely to trundle out of his mouth, 
and he considered his place could very 
well be taken by a gramophone. 

To illustrate the stages of his art, he 
took me to a room to see a young 
actress practice an easy passage, and 
I was much gratified by the manner in 
which she expressed by gesture the 
meaning of the words she was uttering; 
and I could not but admire the subtle 
difference she made in pointing to the 
floor when she said in one case ‘down’ 
meaning merely downstairs, in another 
the infernal regions. The same varia- 
tion was introduced in her rendering 
of ‘up,’ and I did not fail to note that 
each gesture emphasised a new beauty 
in her arms. She also practised some 
‘tone-work’ as they call it, and for my 


L 40 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


benefit declaimed an old-fashioned 
line “To lie in cold obstruction and to 
rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is 
impossible to describe, the frigidity she 
put into the word ‘cold, or the horror 
and loathing with which she vivified 
the word ‘rot,’ so making their mean- 
ing quite clear to any audience. 

My actor friend afterwards told me 
that she had sadly bungled the word 
‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet 
reached the year in which abstract 
terms were studied; and being himself 
nearly at the conclusion of that period, 
he gave me a finished version of the 
line “The quality of mercy is not 
strained,” which quite transported me, 
and which I should not know how to 
praise sufficiently. The gesture for 
‘quality, initially too simple, was 


[41] 


TIMOTHEUS 


raised to a high state of complexity by 
the young man’s genius, and I should 
no doubt have understood it perfectly 
had I been more used to the method. 

I later asked the young woman if 
such interpretation did not involve 
work almost too arduous, since nothing 
is more tiring than to bring one’s ideas 
to the level of common minds; and 
she told me that though the intel- 
lectual labour was harder than in any 
other profession, their task was les- 
sened by the fact that so few authors 
had any idea of what they really 
meant that the actors could substitute 
such phrases as lent themselves more 
readily to their temperament. 

There was another actor, with a 
mobile mouth and masterful manner, 
whom I saw practising for his thirty- 


[ 42 ] 


FUTURE. OF THE THEATRE 


third performance of a part, and there- 
fore engaged in working out a thirty- 
third reading. I was amazed at this, 
which is so contrary to our own 
method, but was soon persuaded of its 
rightness. Fora work of art, this actor 
said, did not exist apart from the ob- 
server—it was a collaboration; and as 
no observer was ever twice in the same 
mood, he could never experience the 
same sensation from the identical 
thing. One might say, to adapt the 
words of an old Greek sophist, “No 
man can go to the same play twice.” 
He then went on to argue very bril- 
liantly that since the actor made the 
work of art, was indeed himself a piece 
of it, his share of the collaboration was 
to make it on each occasion as different 
as possible from the last, so as to help 
[43] 


TIMOTHEUS 


any observer who might come more 
than once toany play. (He knew sev- 
eral ladies who had been to see him no 
less than seventeen times in the same 
character). This also had the extra 
advantage of avoiding that dull 
monotony—for what is art without an 
element of surprise?—so often to be 
seen in our actors, who think they have 
achieved a final rendering, and attempt 
day after day to repeat a thing which 
can never really occur even twice. 

I was much satisfied at what I had 
seen and learnt at the Academy, but 
was made slightly melancholy by the 
thought that if ever I should return to 
my own time, I should find our actors 
and actresses much below the level of 
what I had come to expect from their 
calling. 

[ 44 ] 


IIT 
OTHER THEATRES 


The National theatre which I have 
described was not, of course, the only 
kind, though it had many imitators; 
and I shall now pass to some others, 
beginning with that which I think will 
most interest readers of the present 
day, but which was rarely mentioned in 
the polite society of the age. This was 
the Cathartic Theatre, where people 
went to be cured of the passion of love. 
In our day, as has been for many gen- 
erations past, we often refer to love- 
sickness, but it is half in jest, and there 
are few of us who do not think the 
undoubted pains of the state amply 

[45 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


repaid with its joys. Its dangers, 
however, now only beginning to be 
recognised, were fully taken into ac- 
count in 2,100, for it was seen that the 
claims of society were incompatible 
with an emotion then relegated to the 
songs of derivative poets. Already we 
know that the battle between the self 
and the ideal social self gives rise to the 
most frightful diseases, but in our day 
we only try to cure the unhealthy 
symptom instead of going to the root 
of the matter and abolishing the cause. 
At this time, though the malady was 
well in hand, its approaches were so in- 
sidious that patients going to a doctor 
for what they thought was one sickness 
would often be surprised by a diagnosis 
which convicted them of love, and 
would later be seen entering the 
[ 46 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


Cathartic Theatre with shamed faces 
or that air of studied indifference we 
assume when we do not wish to be 
noticed, thinking that by this method 
we shall appear to have no face at all. 

The theory of this theatre was very 
simple; and this too, I was proud to 
think, had been foreshadowed by 
writers of our own time, one of whom 
had written, “ We have lost the orgy, 
but in its place we have art,”* and 
another “‘ Poetry acts as a physician.” * 
The aim of the performance was to 
break down the obstacles we wrongly 
oppose to our thoughts in rude 
attempts to fit ourselves to social life, 
and so allow to drain away those im- 
pulses which in any really harmonious 


1 Havelock Ellis, A firmations. 
2 Robert Graves, Poetic Unreason. 


[47] 


TIMOTHEUS 


nature should never be set up. I must 
warn the reader of this age not to 
confuse the method with one of ‘sub- 
limation? as we say, for this involves 
the ‘will, a fiction of which the futil- 
ity had long been exposed. It is true 
that I did not very clearly grasp these 
matters, which are too far beyond our 
time—just as Dryden would, perhaps, 
have found it hard to grasp the true 
subtleties of Expressionism—but I 
hope I do not err in saying that an 
element of vicarious fulfilment also 
entered into these dramas, on the 
ground, which no one will contradict, 
that it is the function of art to provide 
what everyday life denies us. The 
name of the theatre, I found indeed, 
had arisen from that reading of Aris- 
totle which confuses the meaning of 
[ 48 ] 


BPUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


Catharsis with that of ‘purgation by 
excess’: for even in those days the 
Faculty of Medecine was not always 
happy in the names it chose for the ills 
and remedies it invented. 

The authorities were, of course, 
fully aware of the risks run in using 
such a specific, and its abuse was hin- 
dered in the same way as we curtail 
the buying of opium and other drugs, 
which wrongly applied prove harm- 
ful; and a man was only able to buy a 
ticket if he showed a paper signed by a 
doctor to declare him a fitting subject. 
Medical men were themselves allowed 
to buy as many tickets as they liked, 
and a large percentage of the audience 
was always composed of them, because 
they wished to observe the effects of 
the cure upon their patients. It was 

[49 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


not without difficulty that Fabian was 
able to get us the needful pass, and it 
was only after representing to the 
authorities that any account of their 
age which omitted so beneficial a de- 
vice would be very faulty, that I was 
granted it. 

Before entering the theatre Fabian 
told me to abandon myself freely to 
any impulse to laugh, as that was a 
condition of perfect purging: and of 
this I was very glad, for I have often, 
not only before, but since my visit to 
this time, felt the pain of constraint at 
light plays, especially if I was with 
relatives, or else friends with whom 
I did not wish to become too intimate. 
But what was my surprise to find, 
instead of the fescennine jesting I was 
prepared for, a play I had already seen 

[50 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


in Manchester, a drama of the most 
correct sentiment by one of our notably 
respectable, even titled playwrights, 
which might call forth smiles and tears 
alternately, but not those crude out- 
bursts of mirth I now heard on every 
side. So little was I able to enter into 
the spirit of the thing that after the 
first act Fabian took me out, whispering 
to me that my callous behaviour might 
have the worst effect upon the patients 
seated near me. He seemed to think 
my bearing had been of set purpose, 
and only grudgingly gave the explana- 
tion I longed for, which was that the 
people in these times saw a wealth of 
allusion lurking beneath the innocent 
phrases; and that what the audience 
so much relished and admired in our 
author was the simplicity with which 


[51] 


TIMOTHEUS 


he had hidden the ‘latent content? 
under the ‘manifest.? When I pro- 
tested my belief that nothing had been 
more remote from the writer’s mind, 
Fabian looked coldly at me, as though 
he were sure I was trying to dupe him. 

It was in vain that I pleaded with 
him to be allowed to attend another 
of these plays, one of later date, for 
Fabian would by no means recommend 
me for a pass, saying that the sense 
would certainly be beyond me. There 
was, however, another level of play of 
the same nature, designed for the 
stupider sort of people, such as mem- 
bers of Parliament, wardens of libra- 
ries, teachers in science or religion at 
the Public Schools, municipal architects 
and so on, for which, not without a 
contemptuous word, he recommended 


520] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


me. He excused his own absence, 
however; for even, he said, if he could 
obtain permission, which he doubted, 
he would not care to go. And indeed, 
after I had seen the piece, I could not 
blame him. For determined as I was, 
this time, to behave with propriety, 
I allowed myself the license of which 
we are all guilty sometimes, when our 
conscience, or ‘censor? to use the 
modern term, is off its guard; and 
Jaughing very heartily, I have since 
felt ashamed at my acquiescence in a 
remedy that must prove so greatly 
worse than the disease. ‘The least 
things there were such as make us keep 
some of our Callot etchings locked in a 
drawer, and to leave certain portions 
of Mr Loeb’s excellent library in the 
original tongue, thoughsome I amtold, 
Psd 


TIMOTHEUS 


regard this only as an ingenious device 
to outwit the laziness of students. At 
all events, since I was not ill, the per- 
formance, I fear, did me no good: 
whether it would have done so in less 
happy conditions I am unable to tell, 
and I dwell upon it no longer, as in 
any case the experiment will not, I 
think, be tried in our day, even in the 
hospitals. Nor would I be convinced 
of the wisdom of the venture if it were. 

In going about the streets I had 
often noticed, especially in the business 
quarters, what appeared to be shops or 
booths, not unlike those places one 
may see abroad, where men sit in rows 
to have their boots polished. Above 
them was displayed a sign on which was 
written “Two Minutes,” or “Thirty 
Seconds,” or some like period of time. 


[54] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


I had seen the backs of men standing 
in lines, with pads clamped over their 
ears and their faces pushed forward 
into a sort of camera, and had supposed 
these retreats to be telephone boxes. 
I was much surprised when Ierne told 
me they were “ Hurry Theatres,” and 
invited me to accompany her to one 
of them. 

They were erected, as the name 
implies, for those without the leisure 
to attend longer performances, and 
were found very beneficial to brokers 
and such, who, hurrying from their 
offices to snatch their midday meal, 
could pause for the declared number 
of seconds, and gain, without waste 
of time, a modicum of ‘organised 
emotion,’ as Ierne called it; and this 
was often a great relief tothem. For 


[55] 


TIMOTHEUS 


when we are too much troubled by our 
affairs we may usefully go to art for 
escape or refreshment. There were a 
few booths in the more fashionable 
parts, for errand boys, journalists, and 
taxi-drivers, while it was found that 
those in the dentists’ quarter were 
much patronised: for in going to have 
our teeth seen to, if we do not like to 
be late, yet we shrink from entering 
the place until the last moment, 
although the waiting rooms are made 
homely and cheerful with time-tables, 
comic papers, and copies of Academy 
pictures. These theatres were also 
agreeable to those who had arranged 
to meet friends at a certain spot and 
were kept waiting, and some had even, 
in the early days, gained a notoriety 
as rendezvous. 


[56] 


PUTUREC OP THE: THEATRE 


The camera through which one 
looked was simply a stereoscopic glass 
directed on a double film screen, and 
the pads were the telephone receivers 
through which one heard the voices of 
the actors, which seemed to come from 
their mouths. The plays themselves 
were most dramatic in character, since 
their object was to endue the spectator 
with a highly disturbing emotion in a 
minimum of time. They were there- 
fore very allusive, and I should have 
found it hard to understand many of 
them if the gestures and tones of the 
actors had not been profoundly strik- 
ing. I grew to be fond of them and, 
indeed, with weakly emotional men, 
they readily become a vice; for when 
thrills are as easily obtained as cock- 
tails, and as rapidly swallowed, if I 

Boal 


TIMOTHEUS 


may use the term, they form a tonic as 
difficult to resist as any digestive, and 
are perhaps as harmful. 

It would be useless for me to write 
down a typical drama, for the reader 
of to-day would not follow it, nor, for 
that matter, relish it more than he does 
those quaint old seventeenth-century 
plays where women dress up as men, 
and blood so freely flows. There were, 
indeed, a few from our own era, known 
as ‘classics,? and sometimes acted as 
curiosities in the neighbourhood of 
museums, but the earliest of these 
must date, I think, from at least 1940, 
and was a comedy with the strange 
title The Psycho-Fans. A young man 
wishing to make a girl his bride, she 
puts him through a number of scien- 
tific, but comical tests, to prove his 


[58] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


worth and hisaffection: she was afraid, 
I gathered, that he might turn out to 
be an ‘introvert,’ and not at all a 
suitable mate for an ‘extravert’ such 
as she was. All I remember of the 
words is the opening of a sort of epi- 
logue he spoke: 


Oh had I wist 
Before I kissed, 
That you werea Behaviourist. . . 


Normally, however, these dramas 
aimed at producing dread, and I 
naturally avoided one which was ad- 
vertised as “ Guaranteed to make your 
soul writhe.” We are not yet made 
of such stern stuff as to derive courage 
to face the battle of life from art of 
this sort, though I have seen robust 
clerks stagger from these booths with 

[59] 


TIMOTHEUS 


white faces and a much increased zest 
for their humdrum labours. This being 
so, I had the temerity to suggest that 
one of these theatres might be installed 
in each government office for the use 
of civil servants, and am gratified to 
be able to say that my proposal was 
acted upon, only the Inland Revenue 
Department being excepted. 

There was one theatre which several 
young people told me was the best, 
but as it did not meet with general 
favour, I did not gothere until the end 
of my visit, for I have always felt an 
abhorrence of what is at all precious, 
and avoided the highbrow and snob- 
bish. It was quite a mean place, not in 
the capital but in a small provincial 
town, and was regulated by a fairfusser 
who had never been able to make his 


[ 60 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


way in a decent centre, owing to his 
poor skill in the art of advertisement. 

The stage was much like that which 
we know, but though built in pleasant 
enough proportions was too simply 
decorated to be striking. The settings 
were so unobtrusive that at the end of 
a scene one could hardly say whether 
the framing had been good or bad, 
which I thought a pity, for one was in 
this manner robbed of a subject for 
conversation. The effects were obtained 
chiefly by the lighting, but unfortun- 
ately this was kept uniform throughout 
each scene, and thus one lost the 
pleasure of admiring the agility of the 
electrician, who nowadays, is, with his 
switches, as great a virtuoso as an 
organist with his stops. The most 
noticeable difference was the stage be- 


[ 61 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


ing only about two-thirds the size of 
ours, the reason for it that the actors 
were not people, but puppets, rather 
smaller than human beings. 

I have always regarded these dolls 
as a mistake, for they must needs be 
anonymous, and how can one tell if 
the acting is good if one does not know 
the name of the performers? I think 
too, that if one is to have puppets at 
all, they should be either grotesque or 
fairy-like, and these were neither, re- 
sembling instead those early Egyptian 
or Indian sculptures we have so far 
out-distanced, or those Byzantine 
paintings, which, once thought beauti- 
ful, would look so oddly on the walls 
of Burlington House. I must confess 
that their movements were graceful, 
their deftness above that of any hu- 

[ 62 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


man being, but not more so than one 
could imagine human beings capable 
of. They were actuated, not by 
strings, but by some invisible power, 
and everything they did seemed to be 
of such happy invention that one felt 
they had all nature at their command 
to use. But I detected a grave error 
in the way the fairfusser made the 
words issue from their lips, for they 
did not speak at all like actors, but 
simply and swiftly, as we all try to do 
in real life, and it is not for that we go 
to the theatre. Their speeches were so 
cadenced that they dwelt in the ear 
like a harmony in music, which is con- 
trary to all experience, so that the 
characters did not seem like men en- 
nobled, but, rather, fleshly embodi-. 
ments of the thought or feeling it was 
[ 63 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 


their purpose to express. One en- 
thusiast, eager to convert me, quoted to 
me the words of some foreign actress 
of our time:’ “To save the Theatre, 
the Theatre must be destroyed, the ac- 
tors and actresses must all die of the 
plague. They poison the air, they 
make art impossible,” which is cruel 
and absurd, and in any case should not 
have come from an actress. For these 
semblances of mankind by their re- 
moteness banished all the accidental 
things which make a play realistic and 
warmly human, and all the personal 
emotion which makes us feel for an 
actor, and applaud him for the pain he 
has gone through. But we cannot feel 
for a puppet, or applaud him, even if 


*Eleonora Duse (Ed.). 
[ 64 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


he has played King Lear, for we know 
his sufferings were not real. 

These plays were always made en- 
tirely by one man—for this fairfusser 
actually had one or two disciples— 
who directed each movement, whether 
of single persons or crowds, either 
tumultuous, or in the dances, which 
met with much applause, though they 
seemed to me even less comprehensible 
than some of the later Russian ballets 
which were lately in vogue for a short 
time. I was told he was always very 
careful about the ‘rhythmic order’ of 
the piece, whatever that may mean, 
and its groupings. All was done first 
on a little model, which in the end be- 
came a record repeated on the larger 
scale. For the voices he took human 
beings, going over and over each 


[65] 


TIMOTHEUS 


phrase until he got exactly the tone he 
wanted, and these he recorded, timing 
them afterwards with the movements, 
so that the whole play went, as it were, 
by clockwork. Thus there was nothing 
spontaneous about it, and this is a 
fault, since art, according to many 
serious philosophers, is a kind of 
game, and thus, surely, if any notion 
of being drilled creeps in, the pleasure 
evaporates. 

The same man also, as a rule, wrote 
the words, which did not remain in my 
memory because I understood them so 
little, seeing that they dealt with 
thoughts and feelings which in our 
day we take small notice of. That this 
must be so is easy to see; for every age 
concerns itself with a different relation 


of man to what is outside him. Weare 
[ 66 ] 


FUTURE OF THE THEATRE 


now, to be sure, beginning to do what 
they were doing,’ in dealing wtih man’s 
relation to man’s idea of what he is; 
that is, so to say in the plain words of 
Albertus Magnus, seeking “the causa- 
tion of causes in the causes of things.” 
But these plays bewildered me, as I 
own without shame, for would not Dr. 
Johnson himself have been adrift at a 
play by Signor Pirandello? And since 
there was so much I could not fathom, 
I should only impart a false twist to 
the meaning however much IJ tried to 
give a true account. 

But I fear these plays disordered 
me, for the unnatural is a sort of 
poison, and I have never since been 
able to feel real pleasure at any drama 
of to-day even in the best theatres in 

*In 2,100 O. S. 
[ 67 ] 


TIMOTHEUS 
Paris, New York, or London. Indeed 


I have almost conceived an aversion 
from our stage; and it is only the 
importunities of my friends that make 
me go toa play once or twice in a year, 
so as not to seem unsociable. If the 
choice is left to me, we go to the 
English version of a French farce, for 
these are usually free from any mean- 
ing at all: and if one expects nothing, 
one cannot be disappointed. 


[ 68] 





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DAEDALUS, or Science and the Future 
By J. B. S. Haldane 


The story of what is being accomplished in the laboratories and how it can " 


be applied with sensational results in daily life.—Presbyterian Advocate. 


ICARUS, or The Future of Science 
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 


Mr. Russell refuses to believe that the progress of science must be a boon to 


mankind.—London Morning Post. 


THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST 

_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. Fully illustrated. 
Brings out some ideas that will prove highly interesting to students of the 
history and origin of man.—Human Progress Association Bulletin. 
WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES. By Prof. A. M. Low 


A discussion and prophecy in popular style of the developments that may be 
expected in wireless.—News Leader. With four Diagrams. 


NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes. By Gerald Heard 
Unusual book, written somewhat from the view-point of the psychoanalyst, 
dealing with the significance to man of his clothes—Human Progress As- 
sociation Bulletin. Illustrated. 
TANTALUS, or The Future of Man. By F. C. S. Schiller 
Endeavors to prove that unless humanity watches its step, it may, indeed, 
be wiped out, but that there is hope for it in the science of eugenics.— 
Newark Evening News. F 
THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS 

By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Se.D., F.R.A.I. 
ae oeiee scholar’s study of evolutionary psychology and morals.—Boston 

erald. 

CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare 

By J. B. S. Haldane 
A famous chemist offers defence of chemical warfare.—Boston Herald. 


QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future 
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F. Inst. P. 


A wonderful vision of the future. A book that will be talked about.—Lon- — 


don Daily Graphic. 


THE CONQUEST OF CANCER 
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S. 
One merit of Mr. Wright’s plan is that he tells people what in his judgment, 
they can best do here and now.—From the Introduction. 
HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge 
By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell) 
The author answers in passing many of the problems answered in Lysistrata, 


and she maintains that intellectual activities and domesticity are not in- 
compatible. 


LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman 

By A. M. Ludovici 
Full of brilliant common sense.—London Observer. 
WHAT I BELIEVE. By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 
The cogent thinking and brilliant writing make this a book to be considered 
by anyone seriously concerned with man’s place in the universe.—Springfield 
Republican. 
PERSEUS, or of Dragons. By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A. 


A diverting little book, chock-full of ideas. Mr. Stokes’ dragon-lere is both 
quaint and various.—Morning Post. 


E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 


a, 


eS a 


3 


TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES 


PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence 

By Vernon Lee 
A consideration of the real nature of intelligence, which the author believes 
to be a modern quality. 


THAMYRIS, or Is There a Future for Poetry? 

By R. C. Trevelyan 
The author, himself a poet, reviews the possibilities of development which 
lie before modern poetry, with conclusions which are not those of an optimist. 


PROMETHEUS, or Biology and the Advancement of Man 
By H. S. Jennings 
A consideration of the problems of heredity and environment. 


PARIS, or The Future of War 

By Captain B. H. Liddell Hart 
A companion volume to Callinicus, reviewing the possible methods of future 
war, other than gas or chemical instruments. 





In Preparation 


CASSANDRA, or The Future of the British Empire 
By F. C. 8S. Schiller, D.Sc. 
A penetrating analysis of the disruptive influences at work in the Empire. 


PEGASUS, or Problems of Transport 

By Colonel J. F. C. Fuller 
An account of “cross-country” vehicles which will achieve a revolution as 
great as that caused by the railway. 


ATLANTIS, or The United States and the Future 

By Colonel J. F. C. Fuller 
A he and penetrating analysis of the American spirit. A companion volume 
to Midas. 


HEPHAESTUS, or The Soul of the Machine 

By E. E. Fournier d’Albe 
A study of the relations between man and his machines. It is vigorous and 
original in point of view. , 


| TIMOTHEUS, or The Future of the Theatre 


By Bonamy Dobrée 
A forecast of the possibilities of the theatre in the future. 


THRASYMACHUS, or The Future of Morals 

By E. M. C. Joad 
A stimulating book by a well known author who thinks along practical, 
forward-looking lines. 
PYGMALION, or The Doctor of the Future 

By Dr. R. McNair Wilson 
LYCURGUS, or The Future of Law. By E. S. P. Haynes 
Deals with urgently needed amendments to existing laws. 
MIDAS, or The Future of the United States 

By C. H. Bretherton 
An impartial criticism by an outsider who has lived in America for ten years. 
EUTERPE, or The Future of Art. By L. R. MeColvin ny 
An interesting discussion of the effects of economic conditions on artistic 
production. 
ARTIFEX, or'the Future of Craftsmanship 


By John Gloag . 
Indicates how the machine may be used to extend the glory of craftsmanship. 


| E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 





